


All the King's Men

by dirtybinary



Category: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Irresponsible Use of Magic, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, accidental demon summonings, no john donnes were harmed in the making of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 08:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10553556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: “Wizard Suliman came from the same place as you,” said Sophie. “Didn’t he?”“I never met him,” said Howl. But as he said it he felt a fiery crackle in the place his heart should have been, and he wondered what he was forgetting this time.Wizard Howl loses his heart. Wizard Suliman loses his head. It's not easy putting them together again.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sonatine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonatine/gifts).



> [zelda](http://sonatine.tumblr.com) is a menace and this fic is entirely her fault

_Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,_  
_Humpty Dumpty had a great fall._  
_All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men  
_ _Could not put Humpty together again._

 

“Wizard Suliman came from the same place as you,” said Sophie, peering out across the mist-veiled garden. “Didn’t he?”

“I never met him,” said Howl. But as he said it he felt a fiery crackle in the place his heart should have been, and he wondered what he was forgetting this time.

 

 

They had spoken for the first time at university, in the library. Howl, who was still Howell Jenkins at that point, had skipped so many grades and taken so many advanced classes that he was—at the tender and undeveloped age of nineteen and three quarters—tearing out his hair over his Master’s thesis. 

As a rule he tried not to tear out his hair. It was very expensive. But these were desperate times.

He had poured seven cups of vending machine coffee down his throat, and was slumped like the Dying Gaul over his books, turning the pages of _The Golden Bough_ with the force of his sighs alone. So far he had garnered several sympathetic looks from the pretty undergrads at the next table, and not a few dagger-point ones from the librarian, but his true quarry was the student sitting across from him. This was a tall gingery personage poring over John Donne’s _Collected Songs and Sonnets_ with a pen stuck behind his ear and a deep furrow of concentration between his brows. It took a while for him to look up, but Howl (Howell, really, for when he got to Ingary it would seem to him as if his student self had been another person altogether) detonated his biggest sigh yet, and at last he did.

“Hullo,” said the tall ginger person. “Are you all right? You’re one of Professor Pentstemmon’s students, aren’t you?”

This was how they had met. Howell had been charging out of Pentstemmon’s office, late for rugby practice; and the ginger person had been charging in, late for thesis advisory; and they had collided in the doorway in quite spectacular fashion. Howell had been annoyed, not only because he had been sent ricocheting off the doorframe like a billiard ball. Professor Pentstemmon—who occupied a strange place between the anthropology and the literature departments, and was agreed by all to be a bit of a kook—did not have many graduate students. Howell had fancied himself the only one. 

Besides, the ginger person had been wearing the oddest clothes: a very well-tailored set of trousers, and something that was more cape than shirt. He must have been taking an independent study module, one that involved travel to distant and exciting places, and which Pentstemmon had so far neglected to invite Howell to join. This struck him as not only unfair, but contrary to the laws of nature.

For that reason, he had been keeping tabs on the tall ginger person. There were other reasons too, such as the proportions of the person’s shoulders and the brilliance of his smile, but if you dwelled on that you had already lost.

“Yes,” said Howell now, putting on his most desolate expression. “Or I shall be till this Friday, when my thesis draft is due and I shall be exposed as a fraud and expelled.” 

The ginger person laughed. He was in regular clothes today, jeans and a red hoodie that clashed horribly with his hair. It was beyond Howell why anyone would ruin their good looks with such an eyesore. “Me too. And I’ll probably have to sell myself as an indenture to Pentstemmon’s old ma to pay off my tuition.” The librarian issued a fierce hissing _shhh_ in their direction, so he dropped his voice to a whisper. “Ben Sullivan. First-year PhD.”

“What kind of name is Suliman?”

“Sul-li-van.”

Ben of the bright smile did not offer his hand to shake, which was a relief. Howell did not like shaking hands. It was such a Gareth thing to do. “Howell Jenkins,” he said. “You’ve met Pentstemmon’s _ma_?”

“You mean you haven’t?”

This was conclusive proof that Pentstemmon and his mysterious, atrociously handsome PhD student were in on some great secret to which Howell was not privy. But there was no time to get angry. The librarian was stumping over to them, radiating menace, her notepad already whipped out to take down their names. Howell and Ben exchanged looks, and without needing words they threw their books into their bags and began a hasty retreat. University myth had it that the librarian’s glare could and had turned students to stone. You could still see one of them in the front lobby of the library, flaking sadly on his plinth.

“The Professor’s never mentioned her to me,” said Howell, once the heavy doors had swung shut behind them. Typically he left the library feeling like Adam cast out of Eden, but not this time. This time he felt like the serpent with a fruit and a bone to pick with all mankind. “Does she live on campus?”

Ben gave him a sharp curious look. Standing, he was a good half-head taller than Howell. “No,” he said. “Not exactly. You’ve never actually done any magic, have you?”

The question would have taken Howell by surprise if Megan hadn’t asked him the exact same thing over the summer, when he’d told her what his thesis was going to be about. Only she’d said it the way she said, “You aren’t, you know, _homosexual_ , are you?” and Ben said it more like, “You mean you’ve never gone to the ballet?”

Howell considered his moves, weighed his options, and gave a breezy shrug. “Oh, I’m sure I must have. The world is full of little miracles, isn’t it?” He waved his hand in an illustrative gesture. Ben’s left shoelace caught briefly on fire. “What are you doing this evening?”

Ben stared at his smoking shoe. He stared for a long time. When he looked up again, the appraising quality to his gaze had resolved into something more decisive. “Nothing much,” he said. “Tell you what, let’s go get ourselves some decent coffee, and you can tell me all about your thesis.”

He hadn’t offered to talk about his own, but this was a start. Howell gave his most bewitching smile. “Sounds excellent to me.”

 

 

Howl came across the guitar at a night bazaar in Market Chipping. It twanged at him, and when he put his hand on the strings to shut it up it twanged all the more, until he gave in and handed over the requisite number of coins for it. It was from Wales, certainly. There was nothing like it among the lutes and lyres of Ingary. Howl had seen hundreds of guitars back home, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that this one in particular knew him; that he would have known it too, if he hadn’t given his heart away.

Still thrumming briskly, the guitar chivvied him down the street to a dingy apothecary, where it twanged with renewed enthusiasm at a skull in the shop window. The skull chattered back. It appeared they came as a set. Howl was out of money by then, so he traded a sapphire earring and a bat of his eyelashes for the thing, trying without success to ignore the goosebumps spreading down his arms. The skull knew him, too.

He didn’t know why it mattered. Nowadays he didn’t know why anything mattered, not anymore. 

“We’re all out of bread!” Michael wailed as soon as Howl came in through the castle door. It was quite an impressive tantrum, for a beginner. The windows rattled with the force of his fury, and the floorboards trembled. Howl was immensely proud. “And eggs! And milk! And firewood! And now you’ve gone and spent our last bit of coin on—” He stared at Howl’s loot for the first time. “What on earth are those?”

“A bit of dead tree and a bit of dead human,” singsonged Calcifer. He gave a doleful crackle. “We haven’t any logs left. At this rate I shall burn myself out.”

“And we’ll starve!” screamed Michael. “What do you even want those for?”

It was perversely enjoyable, being heckled by Michael and Calcifer. At least, it was nothing like being heckled by Megan. “Maybe I wanted a friend,” said Howl, with an air of deepest sorrow. “Maybe, after a long day of listening to the King’s abhorrent brother going on about his missing wizard, and pawning off my most beloved jewels to feed my ungrateful household, I wanted to unburden my soul to someone who would understand me for once.” 

He crashed into the nearest chair and held the skull up to his face. It seemed to grin at him. “A kindred spirit,” Howl proclaimed. “We’re both missing pieces of ourselves, aren’t we, my friend? Here’s a rhyme you wouldn’t know, Michael. _All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men_ —” 

“He’s missing _all_ his pieces,” muttered Michael, but he did look guilty.

Howl clutched at the empty place in his chest. “— _Could not put Humpty together again_.”

“Humans,” scoffed Calcifer. “Always misplacing bits of themselves.”

 

 

“You’ll want to cite this book in your thesis,” said Ben, as they stood with their heads together over a heavy leather-bound tome near the back of the shop. He gave it to Howell and reached for another. “This one too. And this one. Not that one, the fellow’s a fraud, he’s not even a real wizard.”

Howell looked down the knock-kneed aisles of crowded shelves. He was more than familiar with every bookstore within a twenty-mile radius of the university, particularly the smaller establishments where you could get a discount on your textbooks if you looked tragic enough, but he had never seen this one before. It was a very odd sort of place, to be sure, with a musty mildewed smell that was less bookstore than library, and volumes with spines that said things like _Advanced Divination: The Art of the Finding Spell_ and _A Brief History of Alchemy_ and _Melicot’s Dictionary of Ancient Runes._ The patrons were strange, too. There was a teenage girl sitting in the next aisle with her nose deep in _Levitation: Theory and Practice_ , and the tall thin man clambering over her had skin so grey Howell was sure he was dead.

“Hold this for me,” said Ben, shoving his guitar into Howell’s hands so he could juggle three hardbacks at once. The instrument seemed to go with him everywhere, like a witch’s familiar. “There’s no way you can read all these by Friday, but some of them have short summaries you could—are you even listening to me?”

“I was,” said Howell, hurt. He had been looking around for any sign of the portal that led to the place called Ingary, certain that if such a thing truly existed it must be here in the bookstore, this most enchanted of places. He was far less interested in his thesis than in Pentstemmon’s magical otherworld. It was why he had befriended Ben in the first place. “I suppose all these books are from that other universe?” 

Ben grinned, and threw his arm around Howell. He was disgustingly cheerful. “That’s what you’re really after, isn’t it? I swear I’d take you across myself, but Pentstemmon would have my hide and his ma would turn me into a toad. I’ll ask her for permission next time I pop over.”

Howell had known Ben for a week and he had already disappeared three times, presumably to _pop over_ to Ingary. “You’re going there again?” he demanded. The unspoken _without me_ made itself known, quite against his wishes, in a shower of white sparks. 

“No incendiary spells in here, please,” yelled the woman behind the counter. “And no canoodling in the shelves either!”

This was somewhat mollifying. Howell had never been accused of canoodling before, though a great many people seemed to want to canoodle with him. “Look at you,” said Ben fondly. “You’ll get us thrown out. I’ve added you to the authorisation spell on the shopfront, you know, so you’ll be able to come in again even if I’m not here. Otherwise you’d just see a dirty brick wall.”

This, too, was gratifying. If Howell was the type for falling in love, he would have fallen in love with the shop at first sight. There were books enough in here to keep him occupied for the next twenty years. “I’m sure,” he said, “that I could have found a way in on my own. But all right, condescend to me if you must. It is so useful to be underestimated.”

He made a flutter of iridescent butterflies pour out of the book Ben was holding, all a deep indigo to match his sleeves. Ben sneezed and slammed the book shut. “God, you’re a menace,” he said, though his expression did not match his words. “I can’t wait to see what the old woman thinks of you.” 

“Nothing good, probably,” said Howell, scowling. “No one ever thinks any good of me.”

“ _I’m_ someone,” said Ben. “And I’m starting to think the world of you, ghastly insects and all.”

His arm was still around Howell’s shoulders. He moved it a little, just enough that his big callused hand was resting skin to skin against the nape of Howell’s neck, and squeezed. This was the most gratifying thing of all, and on its heels came a couple of alarming realisations. Firstly, that if Howell was to be honest—which he could be, if he strained hard enough and put his back into it—he wasn’t doing this purely to get at Ingary, but to get at Ben as well; and secondly, that he might just turn out to be the type for falling in love after all.

 

 

The guitar led Howl, thrumming at a _basso profondo_ that made his bones vibrate, to a misty oasis at the edge of the Waste. It wasn’t much to look at, really—the bushes were stunted and prickly after months of abandonment, and the few flowers were either runtishly small or grotesquely overgrown—but the whole place was ablaze with vestigial magic. Clearly the Royal Wizard had been busy.

A swarm of indigo butterflies floated sluggishly from bush to bush, giving off a strong smell of old paper. “I can’t believe you kept those,” said Howl dismally, and couldn’t for the life of him think who he was talking to.

 

 

“ _Go and catch a falling star_ ,” yelled Ben, his voice resounding across the shadows of the empty rugby field. “ _Get with child a mandrake root, /Teach me where_ —”

“ _I saw a star slide down the sky_ ,” Howell bellowed back. “ _Blinding the north as it went by._ ” 

They lurched arm in arm across the field, lugging Ben’s guitar and Howell’s typewritten thesis draft and a half-empty bottle of whiskey between them. Ben’s fingers were trailing red sparks, Howell’s blue, and when they linked hands the sparks turned gold and silver and every colour of the rainbow besides. It was three in the morning at the height of the Leonids, and no one was there to see them but the shooting stars. “Not in the mood for Donne?” asked Ben, looking sulky.

“No,” said Howell, or rather, “Nnnnnooooo.” He was two drinks ahead and counting. “Not everyone loves old John as much as you do.”

What he _was_ in the mood for, Howell thought, was to celebrate his draft getting only partly eviscerated by Pentstemmon, and to enjoy his last fortnight of collegiate freedom before he got on the train to go home for Christmas. He wouldn’t have wanted to see Megan at all if it hadn’t been for the new baby. But this was too many words to labour with when drunk. Instead he said, “I never liked Donne anyway. Catch a falling star? What did he know about falling stars, huh, Suliman? I bet he never caught one. I shall, someday.”

“Sul-li-van,” said Ben, very slowly and loudly. “You can’t. You couldn’t run fast enough.”

“Of course I won’t run. I’ll steal your bike. I’ll steal Gareth’s car.”

“Who’s _Gareth_?”

Ben sounded outraged, though it might just have been the alcohol. His fingers curled tight around Howell’s hand. Howell took another swig of whiskey that burned all the way down, feeling warm and floaty and pleased with himself. A bright silver streak dashed itself across the constellations, darting in and out through wisps of cloud on its way to the ground, and he was seized by the sudden urge to grab Ben and go tearing off after it. “They’re supposed to grant wishes, aren’t they? I’ll turn one in to Pentstemmon instead of my thesis, maybe then I’ll actually pass.”

“You’ll set his office on fire,” said Ben. “Who’s Gareth?”

He had stopped walking. Howell went on for several steps before his arm muscles made him aware of this, and he came stumbling back. “My brother-in-law,” he said. “You could meet him. No reason why not. Oh, that’s right, you can’t, because you’re an evil stone-hearted wizard who’d make me face my family all by myself rather than come home with me for Christmas.”

Ben sighed. He wasn’t as good at sighing as Howell was, but it did produce a localised rainstorm around them for a few seconds. “I already told you, I’ve got to go to Mrs. Pentstemmon’s for Midwinter and I don’t know how to get to Kingsbury from your neck of the woods. I’d go with you if I could.”

“See?” said Howell. “Stone-hearted.”

Ben dropped the guitar. It gave a disgruntled twang at his feet, and went silent. He put his hands on Howell’s shoulders and turned him so they were face to face. “Howell. Promise me something.”

Soggy with whiskey, the name came out sounding more like _Howl_. Howell liked that. He thought he might keep it, maybe get rid of the Jenkins too. “Promise me,” said Ben, “you won’t ever go and catch a falling star. You’ll get yourself in the worst kind of trouble.”

Howell closed his eyes, pictured Ben in Ingary in the strange cape and trousers; opened them again, saw him lit by the meteors and the distant stadium lights in jeans and Howell’s rugby jacket, which was much too small for him. “Now, now, Suliman,” he said. “I’ll do whatever on God’s good earth I want.”

“Not in this you won’t,” said Ben. He smelled like old books and apple shampoo, and the familiar unshaven crags of his face were close enough to read like a page of secrets. “You’ve hardly had any magical training yet. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Meteors fell blazing, with no one to watch. “I rather think I do,” said Howell, and stretched up and kissed him.

 

 

“Do you ever regret our deal?” asked Calcifer one morning, quite out of the blue. 

Howl did not answer at once. He was engaged in the dolorous task of tearing up his third-best suit to feed to Calcifer, since they were all out of logs and Michael would not stop breathing noisily and casting long-suffering looks at their empty purse. “Do you?” 

“How could I?” said Calcifer crossly. “If we hadn’t struck it I’d be dead, wouldn’t I? What I want to know is how badly _you_ ’d like to have your heart back.”

Howl’s chest felt perfectly fine without his heart in it. He extended his arm, took hold of his trailing sleeve between thumb and forefinger and began to unravel it, making sure to rip as loudly as possible so Michael could not fail to hear. “I’d auction off that old black lump for a suit half as good as this,” he said, and smashed the nearest window-pane with an explosive sigh.

Calcifer hissed and popped and tittered, but the scornful laughter did not quite mask his relief. “Exactly as I thought.”

He darted an orange-eyed glance at the skull on its shelf over the sink, and the guitar leaning on the wall beneath. They seemed to make him uneasy, a fact Howl only pretended not to notice for the sake of Calcifer’s pride. “What’s the matter, bluesy?”

“Nothing,” said Calcifer, and hid his face under the strips of plum-coloured fabric Howl had flung into the grate. “Except we’re cowards, you and I. I’m much too afraid to die, and you’d do anything but deal with your own broken heart.”

 

 

Howell heralded his own arrival at Ben’s office with a bolt of lightning and a gust of wind. All the PhD students in the literature department had a room of their own, since there were so few of them. Howell had always found this irritating, because _he_ did not have an office, and because Ben always looked so very respectable and Gareth-like working at his typewriter. He took out his feelings by blowing a flurry of snow across the room and causing a tiny, somewhat dishevelled fir tree to sprout from the middle of the desk, showering Ben’s head with needles. “Merry Christmas.”

Ben looked up. Like a flipbook animation, his expression cycled rapidly from annoyance to astonishment to concern. “Howl! Didn’t you go home for the hol—no, don’t step in there!”

Howell looked down, and realised he was standing in the middle of a pentagram chalked on the dusty floorboards. Ben’s office was so full of other wizardly peculiarities, like glass candles and phosphorescent rocks and astrological charts, that this failed to alarm him in the slightest. He produced another billow of snow and cast himself flat on the floor with a wet _flump_. “I came back,” he said. “I argued with Megan the minute I got off the train. I’m broken. She broke me, Ben.”

Ben tried without success to pull him out of the net of chalked lines. Howell could make himself very floppy and heavy when he wanted, a skill that every toddler possessed, and which took no magic at all. “Are you all right?” 

“I’m broken,” said Howell again. Megan hadn’t even let him hold Mari. “I’m shattered. I’m Humpty Dumpty.”

“Sat on a wall, and had a great fall?” suggested Ben. “Swear to God, Howl, I’ll turn you into an egg-man if you don’t get out of my pentagram.”

Howell wanted to be coaxed, not railed at. He did not move. “She’s trying to get Gareth to find me a job again. A job, when I already have twelve different ideas for my doctoral disseration and Pentstemmon’s agreed to supervise me. Can you believe it?”

He dropped another large dollop of snow on the desk. Ben leapt over him to shut the office door, vanishing the powdery white clumps with a flick of his hand. The fir tree gave him more trouble. It hissed at him when he tried to disappear it, and shook a gnarly branch in his face. Howell wondered if this meant he was going to be a better wizard than Ben. “I told you, you’ve got to be more subtle about doing magic here,” said Ben, parrying a vicious stab at his eye. “One of these days you’ll be arrested and I haven’t any money to bail you out.”

Howell had worked himself into a most agreeable rage. He kept right on going. “Last time I let her bully me into a job she all but killed me. I nearly had to spend last summer working at Gareth’s accounting firm—an _accounting firm_ , Ben, can you believe such atrocities are allowed to exist—”

Puffs of black steam began to rise from the edges of the pentagram. Ben rushed back and forth, throwing open the windows and thinking better of it and banging them shut again. “Stop it! You’ll ruin everything! This spell’s due in two weeks!”

“I showed up on the first day,” said Howell, “for no reason other than a deep and self-abnegating familial love, to be sure. But it was awful, worse than freshman orientation. You couldn’t even imagine what I had to go through. I was lying on the ground just like this by ten o’ clock, and they nearly called an ambulance, and Megan wouldn’t speak to me for weeks—”

The lights went out in a shower of sparks. “Howl!” yelled Ben. “I’ll make your hair fall out, see if I don’t!”

Howell gave a great sob. Tears streamed down his face and into the lines on the floor. It was Christmas, and he had no family to spend it with. He was not going to stop. “Make it fall out, then,” he wailed. “It doesn’t matter. Nobody loves me. My sister—” 

“That’s not true!”

“—my sister hates me and my nephew is being taught to despise me and I’ll probably never get to see my baby niece again. I shall go to the grave bald and dressed in sackcloth, as one does. Where is the Reaper? Come and take me!”

The sun went out. One moment the cold pale light of a December morning was streaming in through the windows, and the next moment there was nothing. The guitar screeched. The glass candles burst into flame. The black smoke oozed and writhed and coalesced into a large ghostly figure towering in the middle of the pentagram. It was thin and sinuous and inhumanly tall, and the blade of a scythe glinted between the smoke-eddies of its limbs. “Who summoned me?” roared the creature. “It’s a public holiday!”

Ben froze. Howell stopped crying abruptly, and sat up. “Um.” 

The smoky figure bent itself nearly double to peer at him. It did not look solid, but the scythe certainly did. “It was you, wasn’t it?” it boomed. “No one has asked to be reaped early before, and certainly not such a great wizard. This is most irregular, I’ll have you know, but I am a very obliging Reaper.” 

All Howell’s instincts screamed at him to get out of the pentagram, but his muscles had turned to slush. He might have been a great wizard, but he was also a coward. It appeared the two were not mutually exclusive. “He was joking!” Ben shouted. “Go back! Back! Sorry about the misunderstanding!”

“ _Back_?” said the Reaper. “But I’ve come all this way! I’ve half a mind to reap you both!” 

It peeled one smoky arm from the swirling mass of its body and reached for the scythe. The blade began to descend towards Howell. He drew all his breath for a scream, suppressed it, and promptly screamed anyway when Ben flung himself between him and the Reaper. The scythe missed his ginger head by half an inch. He grabbed Howell and rolled them both out of the pentagram. “Run!”

They ran. The Reaper steamed after them, out of the office and into the empty corridor beyond, down the stairs and into the carpark. It was a good thing almost all the students and faculty had gone home for the holidays, or they would have had a lot of explaining to do, provided they did not die. Howell might have felt silly for screaming, but Ben was screaming too, and babbling as if he had lost his head. “We’ll have to go to Mrs. Pentstemmon! She’ll know how to deal wth it! She’ll kill me, but it’s an emergency, and that thing called you a wizard so I expect she’ll want to see you anyhow—” 

Howl chanced a look back over his shoulder at the Reaper. The daylight had returned, but this did not seem to bother it one bit. “Does the Professor know you’re summoning spirits in your office?” he screamed. 

“Of course!” Ben screamed back. “It’s for my dissertation! But I couldn’t work out what the last ingredient was, not till you showed up! Of course it was a tear! You’re a genius!” 

“I thought your disseration was on John Donne!” Howell shouted.

“It is!” 

They were not heading towards the faculty residences. Instead, Ben was steering them between reading benches and empty seminar halls in the direction of his own dorm. Howell had just enough time to wonder if this was all some elaborate ploy to lure him into Ben’s bed, which would have been flattering but quite unnecessary by this point, and then they plowed head first through the dorm entrance into the foyer. Ben swung them around anticlockwise, and charged them out the door again. 

They had a glimpse of the Reaper cycloning across the lawn towards them, scythe raised. Then the grass disappeared, taking the college buildings and the carpark and the grey Welsh sky with it, and instead they found themselves in an opulent sitting room empty except for the oldest woman Howell had ever seen, reading in a high-backed mahogany chair by the fire. She stared at them. “Oh good heavens,” she said. “You’ve gone and summoned a Reaper.”

She flicked her cane. Howell looked around, ready to scream again, but the only remaining sign of the Reaper was a wisp of greyish smoke. Ben subsided to the floor, clutching a stitch in his side. His grin was heart-stopping. “Welcome to Ingary, Howl.”

 

 

The one good thing about Prince Justin showing up at the castle in disguise was that Howl could pretend not to know who he was, and therefore be as rude as he pleased. “For the eighty-seventh time,” he said, “I have no idea where Wizard Suliman went.”

Prince Justin squinted and tried to peer through the doorway over Howl’s shoulder, as if he thought Howl might have taxidermied the Royal Wizard and strung him up for a living room decoration. Michael had proven far too good at name-blackening. “That finding spell your apprentice sold me last month only pointed me to the bazaar in Market Chipping. And Mrs. Fairfax over in Upper Folding sold me another, and it brought me straight here. So where is he really?” 

Michael came up beside Howl, twisting his hands together. “I might have mucked up that spell,” he said apologetically.

“You most certainly did not,” said Howl. He disliked Justin on sight, but did not know why. It was just one of the many things he had forgotten when he gave his heart away. “My good fellow, the wizard’s not here. If anyone disappeared him it was the Witch of the Waste, not me.”

The prince was not one to give up easily. “Then surely he stopped at your castle on his way into the Waste? He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t have _friends_ ,” said Howl scornfully. Michael looked crestfallen.

“But he’s from the same place you’re from!” cried Justin. “Ben Sullivan! Of the land of Wales!”

The guitar _bruummmm_ ed _._ The skull fell off its shelf with a clatter. Howl’s chest throbbed once, strangely, painfully, and in the fireplace Calcifer emitted a startled sizzle. Howl flung up his arms in a flutter of sleeves, nearly hitting Michael in the nose. “Look what you’ve done! You’ve scared my fire demon! Are you happy now? Will you go away, or must I turn you into a slug?”

He was so afraid he thought he might actually do it. Justin backed away. “But Ben—”

“Never heard of him,” said Howl, and slammed the door in the prince’s face.

 

 

He didn’t mean to lose touch with Ben. Not at first.

They shared a room in Mrs. Pentstemmon’s house, and for a while it was good. They had lessons with the old witch—separately, because Ben was all but done with his apprenticeship, while Howl was just getting started—and went back to Wales three times a week for their regular university seminars. In between, they traipsed around exploring the streets of Kingsbury, and Ben introduced Howl to everyone he knew. The regulars at his favourite tavern. The plump old lady who ran the apothecary and sold spell ingredients to student wizards at half-price. The King’s young brother, and then, most disquietingly, the King himself. 

“We need a house of our own,” Ben mused late one night, when Howl—for that was his name now, out loud as well as in his head—had stolen most of the covers and shoved him to the very edge of their narrow bed. “A house with a bigger bedroom, and a study, and a door that doesn’t lead out of my college dorm.”

Howl stretched out lazily. He had to bend the space-time fabric a little to do so without cracking his head on the bedpost or knocking Ben to the floor. “One might think you didn’t like people seeing us rushing out of your dorm in a state of déshabillé several times a week.”

Ben grinned. “Oh, I don’t mind _that_. But we’re late for class all the time and I don’t see why a wizard should have to dash around in the rain to get anywhere.”

Howl saw what he meant. “We’ll have a door that leads here, and another to Professor Pentstemmon’s seminar room.”

“And to my office.” 

“The rugby field.” 

“The college library.” 

“Megan’s house.” Howl did not particularly want to see his sister again, not after last Christmas, but he did want to see Neil and Mari. 

Ben’s eyes softened, as they always did when the subject of Howl’s family came up. He didn’t seem to have any of his own, unless the Pentstemmons counted. “The royal palace. I think Justin wants to give me a job.”

The stuffy room seemed to lose some of its summer heat. Howl thought of Gareth’s accounting firm, and could not stop thinking about it, and found himself annoyed with Ben for getting him started in the first place. “Our house is going to be all doors,” he said sulkily.

Ben laughed. “We’ll have to think of something. I’m not sure we have the magic to pull it off, anyway. Mrs. Pentstemmon’s the greatest witch in the world besides the wicked one down in the Waste, and even she managed just the one door.”

Now Howl was thinking about wicked witches as well as Gareth and his cohorts of dead-eyed accountants. The room had gone very cold indeed. “Maybe when you finish your apprenticeship,” he said, and rolled over and pretended to go to sleep.

As fate and common sense would have had it, that was not what happened. What happened was that Ben was made Deputy Assistant to the Assistant Deputy Royal Wizard within a week of finishing his apprenticeship, a position that put him on track to become Royal Wizard himself, and which afforded him a set of apartments in the palace far more luxurious than anything he and Howl could have built, magic or not. Prince Justin came in person to escort him there in a carriage, and all at once it became clear that if Howl ever invented an enchanted house with a hundred doors, he would have to live in it by himself.

He made up his mind to hate Prince Justin, until he found that hating a stranger was too much effort, and persuaded himself instead that he did not care what Ben did.

By then he was much too busy to brood on it. He was starting on his doctoral research, and Mrs. Pentstemmon had decided he could be trusted not to perform any more accidental summonings and was starting him on advanced spellwork at last. “Though I do wish you would stop playing that nasty ball game,” she said with a sniff, when Howl excused himself one evening to go to rugby practice. “You’d make much faster progress if you didn’t keep disappearing off to Wales to roll in the mud with thirty men.”

“I suppose I shall have to spend twice as much time with you then, to make up for it,” said Howl with a rapturous smile. He hurried off before she could remind him, yet again, that she was eighty years old and had meant to retire before he barged screaming into her house with a Reaper on his tail.

It was ten P.M. by the time practice ended, and midnight when Howl got out of the shower. The literature department was between the rugby field and the dorms, and as he passed by he saw that the light in Ben’s office was still on. He stopped on the pavement, looking up in a gentle misting of rain. Precognition was—alas—not one of his many magical gifts, but gazing at the square of light that marked Ben’s window, he felt as if something were saying to him, _Don’t go in. Turn around and walk away. Otherwise things will never be the same again._

Howl went into the building, and started up the stairs.

The pentagram was gone, and most of the wizardly accoutrements now resided in Ben’s palace apartments, so the office looked more or less like that of a normal graduate student. Ben was working at his typewriter with five books open around it, two magical, two Shakespeare, and Donne’s _Songs and Sonnets._ “You still play rugby?” he said in surprise, without glancing up from his work. 

Howl chose to ignore this. People in Ingary did not approve of his life in Wales, and people in Wales did not know about his life in Ingary, and whatever he did he was always disappointing someone. He moved the ever-present guitar aside so he could drape himself over the doorframe in an elegant contrapposto, wishing Ben would look at him. “Is that for the King or for your dissertation?”

“Both,” said Ben, his fingers flying over the keys as though his life depended on it. Maybe it did. He looked harassed, his reddish curls slipping limply down his forehead. “I’ve just decided I’ll have to add a section on Curses. Very useful for turning the impossible into the inevitable, you know, because once you have a curse put on you it has to come true no matter what. Works like a prophecy, except it doesn’t have to be bound by the Seven Laws of Fate. It may be the only way to get at the Witch of the Waste.”

Howl glared. “You’re going after the Witch?”

“No,” said Ben impatiently, pushing his hair out of his eyes with a violent swipe. He had never taken that tone of voice with Howl before. “The Royal Wizard will go, or Prince Justin with an army. I’m just doing the research.” He sighed. “Ingary or Wales, the life of a grad student is always the same.”

The mention of Justin set Howl’s teeth on edge. He rearranged his limbs and switched tactics. “Are you coming by Mrs. Pentstemmon’s at all this week, then? She’s having a special dinner on Friday.” He drew a breath and added feelingly, “It’s my birthday.”

“Howl,” said Ben, “it’s been your birthday five times since I met you. Anyway, I’ll probably have to go into Strangia with Justin this week.”

He was still typing, and flipping feverishly through _Songs and Sonnets._ This was too much. “All right,” said Howl, changing tack yet again. “You’d better go, since the prince is so fond of you and neither me nor poor Mrs. Pentstemmon are royal enough for you anymore. Go and _marry_ Prince Justin, and the Witch of the Waste too for all I care. I hope she glues the two of you together.”

Ben glanced up at last. He looked more astonished than angry. Somehow this seemed even worse. “Good God, Howl, it’s my job. I’ve got to work to earn my keep. Believe it or not, some people can’t master a spell just by weeping on it like you do.”

For some time now, Howl had been edging towards the line between theatrical petulance and true fury. Now he shot across it with all the force of a cannonball. “Weeping?” he said. “ _Weeping_? Just because you’ve never seen me work doesn’t mean I don’t!" 

“Well, I never have!” yelled Ben.

“That’s because you haven’t looked away from Prince Justin long enough to notice!” screamed Howl, an accusation he knew was as unfair as it was pleasurable to make. “Have a good time in Strangia!”

He spun out of the doorway _en pointe_ , stomped down the stairs with all the clatter of a whole rugby team, and crashed out into the carpark like a cavalry charge. It was one of his finer dramatic exits. He felt rather pleased with himself, until he looked back at the shadowy building with its single bright window, and realised that Ben was not coming after him.

 

 

When Ben graduated in July, Howl inherited his office and a packing carton full of books, including the _Songs and Sonnets_. He had come to loathe that book. It was full of scribblings and dog-eared pages, and seemed emblematic of Ben’s new, important, and terribly respectable life. He flipped it open to the most-thumbed page and read: 

_Go and catch a falling star,_  
_Get with child a mandrake root,_  
_Tell me where all past years are,  
_ _Or who cleft the Devil’s foot—_

He shut the book with a thud, and threw it back into the box. 

Later that week he put in effect his withdrawal from the university, citing financial hardship, and got on the train back home. There he wept artfully enough on Megan’s shoulder that he was allowed to hold Mari for ten seconds, and then collected himself and set off in search of a new door into Ingary.

 

 

The falling star did not know any John Donne. It merely sat streaming fire in Howl’s hands, an upside-down teardrop of flame without heat, so terrified that it was blue in the face. Or perhaps that was the colour it was supposed to be, and it was merely furious. “You’re mad!” it shrieked. “I don’t know what any of that means! Put me down at once!” 

Howl felt almost as sorry for it as he did for himself, which was very sorry indeed. He had been at loose ends ever since his apprenticeship with Mrs. Pentstemmon ended. In the last month he had taken to spending his nights wandering the marshes off Porthaven by himself, in part because this lent him a tragic and romantic air most useful for a young sorcerer trying to establish his own practice, but mostly because he was hiding from the angry aunts who kept trying to brain him with their frying pans for seducing their nieces or nephews. He only did it because he was afraid to sleep in his new house alone, but none of them were sympathetic when he tried to explain this. 

At any rate, he was not alone now. He stared at the fallen star. “That will most certainly put you out, my friend.” 

The blue flame shivered. It _was_ afraid. “Then do something! Give me your heart!” 

Not many years had passed since the Leonids had fallen over a rugby field in Wales. Howl found himself thinking of a man who was now Royal Wizard, the youngest ever appointed; who still had ginger hair and broad shoulders and a quick smile, and with whom he exchanged only the most fleeting of pleasantries. “My _heart_?” he said. “That’s a bit forward of you, isn’t it?” 

The star hissed. The air filled with the smell of volcanoes. “Is it given to another?”

Too quickly, Howl said, “No.”

His dishonesty was either going to be his ruin or his salvation. “Then give it to me!” cried the star. It was dimmer now, its light fading. “I’ll make a deal with you! I’ll make you a great wizard!”

“I already am a great wizard,” said Howl indignantly.

“Then I’ll build you a castle, or anything you want. Only hurry!”

Howl imagined stretching up and putting the star back in the sky where it belonged, one lord of the night among many. But no wizardry had yet been invented that could do that. Was it so important to have a heart, anyway? He had had one for twenty-two years and it had given him nothing but grief. Maybe this frightened creature would put it to better use than he had.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “I suppose I can spare it. It’s broken, anyway.” 

“Is it?” asked the star, its bright little face dubious. “I hope it still works.” And it stretched out one incandescent hand as if to pick a flower, and plucked Howl’s heart from his chest.

 

 

Afterwards, when Howl had seven-leagued it back to his Porthaven hovel, his new fire demon peered out at him from the hearth it had commandeered. It had turned up its nose at the first four names Howl offered, saying they were not nearly fearsome enough, and decided it was to be called Calcifer. “What was that strange spell you were reciting when you caught me? The one about the falling star?”

Howl started to answer, a glib response already half-formed on his lips. Then he realised he had not the slightest memory of what he had been saying, nor why it had made him so sad. He felt so free now, so light. So empty. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “It can’t have been very important.”

 

 

The first visitor to the moving castle was none other than the Royal Wizard himself. He took Howl by surprise by showing up alone at the Kingsbury door, having made no appointment and brought no entourage, and apparently with no kingly errand either. “You really did it, old friend,” he said, gazing around the inside of the castle. “And with only one door, too. Impeccable spellwork.” Then he added, “The blond hair suits you.”

This curious person felt to Howl as familiar and remote as something out of a past life. Perhaps it was the accent, which was not quite Welsh and not quite Irish. For some reason Howl could not look directly at him, and as soon as he glanced away he forgot what the fellow looked like. All he had was a muddled impression of red hair and bright eyes, poetry and shooting stars, and a mouth that had been made for smiling but was now quite serious. The cavity in his chest ached. “Have we met, my good sir?” 

Wizard Suliman blinked at him. Then he glanced at the fireplace, where Calcifer was trying to hide and peek through his logs at the same time. Howl had never known him to be shy before. “A fire demon,” said Suliman. “I thought so. Not even you could have done this by yourself. And of course you’ve gone and given away your heart as well, you great fool. I warned you not to.”

Howl was not sure he liked this person’s manner of speaking. No one was allowed to call him a fool except Calcifer and Mrs. Pentstemmon. “I don’t remember,” he said with a pleasant, vacuous smile, “but as a rule, warnings make me _more_ prone to do the thing in question, not less.”

“I know that,” said Wizard Suliman irritably. It was not the name he had been born with. There was another, beating distantly at the hatches of Howl’s memory, but he could not quite pin the syllables down. That alarmed him. True names had power; it was the first thing any wizard learnt. “I didn’t think you’d actually forget me, though. I never imagined you kept me in your heart. You didn’t seem to care much for anything except books and magic. Once you left, I wondered if you’d only been using me to get into Ingary.”

He sounded sad, though it was hard to tell. Howl had found feelings elusive—particularly other people’s—ever since he made his deal with Calcifer. “That’s me all right,” he said. “I’m quite heartless. Now, is there anything I can do for you? The King needs a spell, perhaps?” Then he remembered that he had resolved to be aloof and unhelpful and to overcharge his clients, especially the kingly ones, and added, “I may be able to spare one of my apprentices to deal with it.”

He had no apprentices. Wizard Suliman gave a wry smile, as if he knew this. “No,” he said. “I can manage for the King. I just came to inquire if _you_ needed help with your new castle, but I see you don’t.”

To Howl’s relief, he began to drift to the door; and to Howl’s annoyance, he stopped on the threshold and looked back. “I’m sorry I didn’t go after you that night. It was a bad time, with the Witch stirring in the Waste and all. I was in over my head, and you know you can be so exhausting.” 

This was growing tiresome. “Oh, I know,” said Howl brightly. “Whatever you’re talking about, I’m sure it’s all in the past now. If you ever need help, I’ll send you all three of my apprentices and my journeyman. Goodbye!”

“Goodbye, Howl,” said Wizard Suliman, and left at last.

Howl bolted the door and spun the knob several times. He was shaking all over, and his empty chest felt as if it had been marinated in acid. He swung to the fireplace and rounded on Calcifer. “What was that? _Who_ was that?”

Calcifer dove to the heart at the bottom of the grate, as if he was afraid Howl might snatch it up and try to stuff it back into his chest. He flickered up and down, looking fretful. “How should I know? At first I thought he was another of your jilted lovers, but it sounded more like _he_ ’d jilted you.”

“I’m sure,” said Howl with dignity, “I would remember him if he had.”

“No,” said Calcifer. “You wouldn’t. Not if you kept him in your heart like he said. I wish you’d mentioned it when we made our deal, but it’s too late to—oh, stop that! Stop it! I hate it when you drip on me!”

 

 

Howl invariably came back from Wales either steaming mad at Megan or sniffling with a cold. This time it was both. He spent the day going about in the rain from bookstore to bookstore, trying without avail to track down the volumes his sister had sold; and then he came back and spent most of the night ransacking the castle with equally little success, until at last Sophie hobbled over and stood glowering at him. “ _Now_ what is wrong with you?”

A long and comprehensive list immediately composed itself in Howl’s head, including but not limited to _Mrs. Pentstemmon’s dead_ and _There’s a curse on me_ and _Megan hates me_ and _I keep trying to make you young again, but you don’t seem to be allowing me, perhaps because you don’t want me falling in love with you, which is too bad because I already have, and also I’m still waiting for you to break my fire demon’s contract so I can get back my missing memories and it doesn’t look like you’re going to do that either and why do I love you anyway_. But the circumstances were too dire for a thorough airing of grievances. He husbanded his strength and focused on the most pressing one. “John Donne, _Collected Songs and Sonnets_ ,” he said, stabbing a finger at her. “It’s a thin book with a purple cover. Did you move it when you were mopping? Or have you managed to clean it right out of existence?”

Sophie’s glower intensified. It should have been on display in a museum. “I would do no such thing. Why do you want it anyway? Didn’t Miss Angorian read you the rest of the poem?”

“That curse wasn’t the Witch’s work,” said Howl. “Or her fire demon’s. It was another wizard, and I’d recognise his handiwork anywhere, even if I can’t seem to remember his true name unless someone else says it first—”

“Ben Sullivan?” said Sophie blithely.

The usual sequence of events unfolded. The guitar squawked. The skull chittered. The hole in Howl’s chest gave its most ferocious twinge yet, worse than when Miss Angorian had brandished the name at him like a flaming sword, and Calcifer crackled uneasily. On top of everything else, Sophie’s horrible red setter barked and trotted over to give Howl the evil eye. He felt a hysterical urge to laugh. “My dear Sophie,” he said. “I expect you’ll kill me, put Calcifer out, and bring down the castle to its last stone all before the Witch catches up to us. Yes, him.” 

The dog nosed at the guitar. It gave another twang, this one more melodious than before. Howl broke into a cold sweat. “He was an old school friend of mine. The book belonged to him. I only just remembered that when we went to Wales.”

Sophie looked dubious. “But why would Ben Sullivan put a curse on you? You didn’t jilt him too, did you?”

The sequence of events repeated itself. Howl felt the blood drain from him, and had to cover up his sudden weakness with a sneeze that shook the rafters. “Stop it!” cried Calcifer, blazing a sickly cerulean. “Names are dangerous, you know!”

“Is it hurting you?” asked Sophie anxiously. Howl reeled with this unprecedented kindness, until he realised she was talking to Calcifer.

“We’ll live,” said Calcifer, not without a baleful fizzle. “It was the Witch’s fire demon who cast the curse. Wizard Suliman just designed it, though he may have intended it to find Howl. They have a _history_.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Sophie. “Howl has a history with everyone.” She gave Howl a withering look. “Weren’t you busy dying of a cold, anyway?”

“I took a break to nurse my broken heart,” said Howl. “I shall resume dying now, thanks very much for the concern.”

He coughed like a firecracker until she stumped off muttering, the dog at her heels. As soon as he was alone with Calcifer again, Howl reached out a tentative hand and touched the guitar strings. They produced a sad chord in a minor key. He had a brief vision of a dark field and a sky strewn with silver stars, his mouth warm with whiskey and the touch of another person’s lips. He withdrew his hand in a hurry.

Calcifer was watching him. “I felt that.”

“Sophie’s magic,” said Howl, and folded himself into a small disconsolate ball by the hearth. He _would_ keep running into witches with powers stronger than his own. “It’s all her fault.”

 

 

“What do you mean?” said Sophie, half astounded, half outraged. She really was in the most fearsome mood today. “You’re not sure the Witch put him back together properly? Do you mean to say poor Percival is _both_ Prince Justin and Wizard Suliman?”

Howl gazed up at the ceiling, and kneaded at his temples. “No. He’s neither.”

“But what do you remember?” Michael persisted. “Surely you must recall something besides being a dog?" 

“I’ve told you all of it,” said Percival, looking wretched. “Except—well, this is going to sound ridiculous, but there’s this bit of verse going round and round my head, though I’m sure I’ve never heard it before—”

Sophie brandished the bucket of weed-killer. “If it’s that fellow John Donne again, we don’t want to hear it.” 

“No, it’s just a silly children’s ditty,” said Percival. He cleared his throat and began to recite. “ _Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great_ —”

Calcifer roared. Blue flame shot up the fireplace and into the chimney-shaft. They all jumped. Howl staggered and crashed into the nearest wall, clutching his twinging chest. “All right!” he yelled. “All right, Ben, goddamn you, I’ve got the message! I’ll put you back together! Now shut up!” 

Silence fell over the room. Percival just looked more perplexed than ever. “See?” said Sophie, managing to look both smug and enraged at the same time. “I knew you could remember his name if only you put some heart in it.”

Howl sighed, kneaded at his temples again, and resolved to go out and get drunk at once.

 

 

When at last he was sober enough to think in prose and complete sentences again, it was early in the morning of the ten thousandth day of his life, and everyone was asleep but Calcifer. This suited him just fine, since he wanted to be alone. He went carefully down the stairs, swayed on the landing for a moment, and wobbled over to the fireplace. 

“Well, old blueface,” he said, “it seems we shall have to look for the Royal Wizard after all.” 

The skull grinned. Calcifer gave a dismissive crackle. “You’ve been looking for him since the night you caught me.”

 

 

**AN EPILOGUE**

 

Much later, after Howl had regained consciousness, defeated the Witch’s fire demon and gotten his heart back, he found himself confronted with both his last love and his first in the same room: Sophie Hatter with her beautiful red-gold hair coming down in cascades around her familiar annoyed expression; and a tall ginger person smiling a somewhat subdued version of his usual dazzling smile. Howl thought about how alike they were, and what this said about him, and decided it was all too much for his newly recovered heart.

“I always did have a thing for redheads,” he announced. “Sophie, Ben, my dears, I shall faint.” And he fainted dead away for the second time that day, or at least pretended to, which got rid of the extraneous people in the room quite handily.

 

 

**A SECOND EPILOGUE**

 

Howl spent the first weekend after Midsummer exiled to Wales with Ben. Sophie and Lettie had joined forces and thrown them out, citing the soulful sighs and wounded looks they kept exchanging—“like a right old pair of dewy-eyed fools,” fumed Sophie, whose renewed youth had not improved her temper at all. “Worse than Michael and Martha! Now get out there and don’t come back till you’ve kissed and made up!”

Kissing would have been nice. Making up was harder work. You could not skip steps, though. They fetched up in a coffee house not far from their old university, eyeing each other over scones and iced tea, neither knowing where to begin. At last Ben sighed and said, “I still can’t believe you forgot me.” 

Neither could Howl, but if he admitted this he would have to start feeling sorry. “I can’t believe you put a curse on me.” 

“Technically it was Miss Angorian,” said Ben, but to Howl’s satisfaction he did look guilty. “I was going to put it on myself so I could get at the Witch, but by the time the King let me go to the Waste my ten thousandth day had come and gone, and all I could do was hang around pretending to garden until she found me—” 

“—and you left the curse lying around where her fire demon could find it and put it on me, because I hadn’t yet lived ten thousand days, as if that gave you the right—”

“—and because you were the only other wizard I knew who could have taken the Witch,” said Ben, flashing his old toothy smile. He really was unbearably cheerful. “And it worked, didn’t it? You did destroy her and her demon, even if Sophie and my scarecrow had to do most of the heavy lifting while you were swooning on the floor.” 

Howl flicked a crumb of scone at him. He had missed being teased like this. It was like hearing your old favourite song on the radio, and realising you still knew all the words. “No gratitude at all,” he said mournfully. “I should have left you as half a dog. I would have, if you hadn’t been intent on mauling me.”

“That was Justin,” said Ben, “and he wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t been so rude to him. Anyway, _you_ sold my school books—” 

“That was Megan,” said Howl. 

“—and polished my skull—” 

“That was Sophie!” 

“—and gave your heart to a falling star like a complete idiot, as if carrying it around inside of you was too much work—”

“Well, I didn’t know what to do with it!” yelled Howl. A few heads turned. “You hadn’t spoken to me in two years and people kept asking me to marry them! I had to give it to Calcifer for safekeeping!”

Ben was staring. A dreadful memory resurfaced in Howl’s mind then, one he had almost lost. Ben had come to the castle soon after it was built, and said, _I never imagined you kept me in your heart._ He hadn’t known. And when it came down to it, whose fault was that?

“Anyway,” said Howl at a more normal volume, and in what he hoped was a more normal tone, “I have it back now, and it’s mine to keep. Mostly. I promised Sophie an aorta if she agreed to marry me, and she said yes, I can’t imagine why. I suppose you can have a valve or two.”

With a straight face, Ben said, “I must insist on a ventricle at least.”

Howl waved a hand grandly. “Sure, all right.”

Ben had a soft look in his eyes, which Howl found almost as marvellous and as terrifying as any of Sophie’s glowers. Maybe things were going to be fine, then. “When’s the wedding?”

“Soon,” said Howl. “Sophie says long engagements are for indecisive fools and slither-outers. How are Lettie’s lessons going?”

“So far she hasn’t pretended to accidentally summon a Reaper just so I’ll take her through a magical portal,” said Ben, “so I daresay they’re going well.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” said Howl. “I was beginning to think you really thought I’d done it by accident. As if I would ever be so careless.” 

Ben grinned. Howl found himself grinning too, even though he had always thought smiles made his face look ridiculous. The coffee shop was filling up with the brunch crowd, people jostling their table as they flowed past. Their scones were growing cold, and their iced teas were sweating condensation, but neither of them paid any attention. “Come on,” said Ben. “Let’s cook up a finding spell and go hunt down those books of mine.”

“I’m going to burn every last one of them,” Howl warned. But he paid the bill and stepped out with Ben into the quiet of the early morning, side by side and shoulder to shoulder as they had been before, and the air still sparked in a kaleidoscope of colours when they touched hands.

**Author's Note:**

> come and scream about trashcan wizards with me on [tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com)


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